The duct-taped sounds of Ava Luna

In Spotify Essentials, the Daily Dot curates custom playlists created by some of our favorite artists and writers. In this installment, Brooklyn’s Ava Luna introduces some key influences for the band’s incredible new LP, Electric Balloon.

The speakers in our 20-year-old van are long gone, so we get our music from a set of computer speakers duct taped to the dashboard and powered through the cigarette lighter.

These are all songs that we have discovered together, or that one or more of us has loved deeply and put on for the others. Some are tied to a particular time and place. “The Israelites” is the first night we spent upstate together, a turntable in a cozy living room in the woods, working on the material that would become Electric Balloon.

“Small Car” is a drive down to Mississippi, sun long gone; truck stops, then strip malls, then dirt roads and fields of cotton. “New Toy” is a stop at a thrift store in San Francisco, when all we had was a tape player with one built-in speaker and every new tape purchase represented a great improvement in our circumstances.

Some just feel like they’ve always been in rotation, like “So Good At Being In Trouble” and anything off Tusk. And some are just championed by one person and graciously borne by the others. All of them have been consumed and digested and regurgitated through our own creative choices; sometimes in an explicit way, sometimes oblique.

Ava Luna’s new album, Electric Balloon, is out now on Western Vinyl.

Photo by Emily Pick/Western Vinyl